I see comments on posts such these very often where people complain about opensource products like Linux phones, Linux itself, or pretty much anything else, not being as good as their proprietary, funded, and profits driven alternatives. How are such projects supposed to compete without money and full-time developers? Especially when people are unwilling to donate to them “because they just aren’t there yet”, how do they expect the projects to quickly get to a point where they are boob friendly and usable?
People will disparage groups that try to make something with barely any funding and time. There are so many negative comments about the PinePhone, Phosh, PostMarketOS, and so on. It’s disappointing to have such a community.
As soon as an opensource project asks for funds, integrates a question for funds in their software, uses a restrictive license or something like a business source license, someone will complain about it on social media and blow up the maintainers’ repository and socials. Why are we so averse to opensource contributors earning a living writing opensource?
If people don’t want to fund opensource (or “source available”) until “it’s ready” and resist any attempt to make money from it, how it the model supposed to succeed in being an alternative for the majority?
Sorry for the rant, but why can’t we as a community be more active in supporting our opensource contributors instead just waiting for the apples to fall into our and their laps?
I agree completely and I’ve been banging that drum for 15 years.
But, it’s important to note that financial is only one way to contribute. Your metaphorical sweat can also be your contribution.
The common thing people say is that “Well I don’t know how to code.”
But do you know how to proofread? Do you have some skills as a graphic designer or web-designer?
As far as I’m concerned, every user of a piece of FOSS software must at a minimum be signed up for the bug report forums because that in itself is the most basic form of contribution and it’s incredibly helpful to the developers who don’t have the time or the staffing to find all the bugs themselves.
I’m no big open source dev, but when I started my own project, it gave me motivation to see people using and sending issue reports.
… get to a point where they are boob friendly…
What are some FOSS projects that are already boob friendly?
Edit: I guess my attempt at trying to humorously highlight the typo failed lol
Thank you all for your genuine responses though <3ShareX, Thunderbird, Firefox, Linux Mint
I donate on a monthly basis to some open source projects I find really useful.
I would argue it’s a cultural thing. The internet has conditioned every to think in terms of nominally free, so it’s difficult to get people to pitch in. There are also on-boarding issue, there is no standardized protocol for managing subscriptions/donations. The size of fees (in % terms) for small scale donations (e.g. $1 a month) are relatively high.
We are likely going to have a major change in socio-political thinking (e.g. compare and contrast the world before WW1 and after WW2) before we get anywhere with this.
Sorry for the rant, but why can’t we as a community be more active in supporting [blank]
I don’t care about your fantasy of utopia, I need a working thing.
That doesn’t mean I’m hating on anything. Specifically the pine phone’s mistake was that they branded as “early adopter” thing too hard. If it says “extensive linux experience required”, that’s not me and I’m not going to sink 200-400$ into a thing that “likely” won’t work, because I don’t have the prerequisite experience.
It’s not my idea to make “open source business” work, the people who are offering that sort of stuff believe in it, and they have to make it work.
Me not believing in that fantasy and calling a “not fit for purpose thing” not fit for purpose, doesn’t make me a dirty traitor ‘to the community’.
Same for “struggling artists” btw. I see the same pattern in that space. If art doesn’t work for you, do something else.
“I need [something that costs nothing] to compete with [something backed by seas on monies]”
“P.S I’m not entitled”
If opensource doesn’t fit your needs, continue using the privacy invasive products you buy that fund the bombs dropped on innocent children and the 1984 world its founders aim to have.
These are only my opinions:
I think the issue is “phase changes” are always going to be tricky in any community, and the path an open source project takes always includes one or more phase changes.
Aspect 1: Tinkerer vs User.
By their nature, most FOSS projects start with a person who wants to solve a problem for themselves, rather than as a business idea. This attracts the sort of person who is maybe only vaguely worried about solving that problem, but is very interested in the solution itself. Or maybe the tool does 90% of what it needs to for this new use-case, so a tinkerer is happy to go in and add the extra 10% themselves to get it to work.
But at some point along the line a project becomes popular or useful enough that Users show up. And Users want something fundamentally different than Tinkerers. They don’t want to work on the project, they want to use the project as-is to do some other work. It’s just a tool that allows them to accomplish what they’re really trying to do. And the Tinkerer mindset that got the project to here is fundamentally incompatible with the User mindset that allows it to grow outside a small group.
It’s important to note that almost everyone who is a Tinkerer in something, is also a User of other things. Maybe I’m working on this project, but my editor is just a thing I use. I need that to work without me thinking about it, so I can get the other work done for the project I do care about. And if I’m tinkering with my editor then I need my kernel to just work. Or my hardware. Or my internet. Or my electrical grid. These were all things that somebody once tinkered with, that now I’m just using, but that transition is fraught.
So if I’m Tinkering with a Linux phone, I’m more tolerant of issues, I’m invested in the project improving, and it’s fun to overcome limitations. This is essential for the project to start and progress, but there will only be so many people interested in that. Everyone else is a User who just wants to read their emails at the grocery store, and is pissed when that doesn’t work.
Aspect 2: Hobby to Job.
At some point most FOSS projects are an intrinsically interesting hobby, but the idea of financial support makes them an extrinsically motivated job. Studies have shown in a lot of cases being paid to do something actually makes it less enjoyable or interesting, even when it’s the same actions in both cases. So there’s that paradox, my job takes time away from this hobby, but making this hobby my full-time job makes me want to do it less.
But even more importantly at a project level there’s a phase change around funding. Most of these projects when they’re just a few people in their spare time, have no need for money. What does $7 a week really get me. Sure it’s “support” and “thanks”, but it doesn’t do anything to shift how this project fits into my life. Then that grows to $100 a week. That’s money, for sure. But it’s not “quit my job” money. So I get this money, it helps with groceries, but still doesn’t produce more time to work on the project. At, like, $1000 a week, now I can maybe quit my job if I live in certain parts of the world. Everything up until now is kinda “nothing” and then it’s only when we get here that suddenly “something” changes. Phase change. But I still can’t hire a second person. And until I can, any extra money is more income for me, but doesn’t really help the project either. I’m already full-time on it, and $1500 a week doesn’t buy me more time.
So because of that phase change, when the project is small it feels like there’s no reason to go through the work of setting up donations or subscriptions or whatever, because it’s a hassle that’s just going to get me, like $7. At first.
Aspect 3: Project to Product.
Like the Tinkerer to User spectrum, but for the community as a whole. When we’re all working in our spare time for free, giving the result away for free is easy. And it feels good, because we’re a community. But at some point in the future of this project, one can imagine a point where there’s a company that sells this product for money or makes money off it in some other way.
But when? We’re here, that potential future is there, and like with Hobby to Job, there isn’t really a smooth line between the two. It doesn’t feel like a Product now, I’d be embarrassed selling this and I don’t even know who’d want to buy it. But if it’s ever going to be a Product, someone’s going to have to buy it. Someone’s going to be the first to buy it, even. Who? When? How? These are answers that will have seemed obvious in retrospect, but are perhaps impossible to tell in the moment.
And what’s worse is that the skills it takes to sell things to a company are different than the skills it takes to Tinker. In some ways even opposite skills, given that the Tinkerer just wants other people to be interested in what they’re interested in, and wants to give it away for free. They want to spread it without restriction, that’s why they started working in a FOSS thing in the first place! At which point does that person decide to charge someone money instead.
And what’s even worse than a User is a Customer. Where a User might just want something to work, a Customer feels entitled to the thing working. What else did they pay for, if not a working thing. But $70 is a lot of money for a Customer to spend, and not a lot of money for a Tinkerer to use. So the amount of entitlement the Customer feels outpaces the amount of value the Tinkerer recieved in trying to bend their project to the Customer’s demands.
And as the company gets bigger to support more and more customers, you start needing lawyers and HR and payroll and support people and graphic designers etc etc etc.
This is partly why so many tech projects are picked up by already established companies and deployed as part of their product. Because they already have all that crap the Tinkerer doesn’t like thinking about, and the code is freely available for the taking.
A related thing to Aspect 3: Project to Product I forgot to cover was the “selling out” aspect. Ignoring the original creator of a project, the other Tinkerers and Enthusiasts who join a project early are the sorts of people attracted to the idea of the project, and also the value of its freedom. That’s why they joined a scrappy little community in the first place, and supported its organic and natural growth.
But when money starts coming into it, that same sort of person is often going to feel a little betrayed by it. I was just doing this for altruistic reasons, and it seemed like you were too, but now this is a financial project? Now you’re charging money? I’m not getting any of that money for the work I did to get us here. It doesn’t feel like “we” are all equals here. It’s not a community once one of us is making money and the rest of us aren’t.
Wasn’t the point of this to give it away? For free, to anyone and everyone? When did that stop being our goal?
Etc.
Feelings can be hurt, incentives can change, and that’s difficult for a project socially.
one of, if not the biggest, contributor to linux software is valve
they manage by making a boatload of money with steam
so make an android or linux app store that sells software i guess?trust me, i need money a lot more. i do translations tho as contribution.
I like to think I’m all in on open source. It’s not true though. I use a few things with proprietary licenses (mostly work related), but I actively try to keep it to a minimum. I don’t need “the best”. I need things that work. And despite what so many people say or claim, open source does work and it is, for me at leas, good enough.
Open source developers and projects get my support.
Open source is the very worst thing currently going on because it is so incredibly exploitative, it’s far more exploitative than any actual company is of the workers who work at the company.
Even the people who are getting paid in open source are getting massively underpaid to do it compared to how much the people who are using their code are making, it’s nothing compared to the power that is accreted by the people who have co-opted that work thanks to the open source model. And then mark zuckerberg gets to define how the internet works despite having paid for almost none of the software that his company actually needed to make that work.
It’s like feudalism or serfdom, these people did the work and got nothing for it. It’s like you took the worst aspects of capitalism for workers and the worst aspects of socialism for workers and put them together, that’s open source. You get no power and you get no money.
It’s exploitative whether the people chose to be exploited, just because someone chooses to let you exploit them does not meant that you didn’t exploit them. And for the record that’s how most exploitation works; convincing people to do something that turns out to be very bad for them and very good for you, and that’s exactly what the open source movement has turned out to be.
I really don’t see the “we post stuff on github under a gpl2 or lgpl or apache or mit license”, all that is to me now is just exploitation. You can say that there’s solutions but until someone demonstrates that those solutions work, it’s the standard “real communism has never been tried” argument. AGPL is the only thing that I’ve seen so far that’s an attempt to fix these fundamentally unfair compensation practices.
